JetBlue Customers Feel the Pain

Noah Shachtman
09.27.03

The fear of flying wasn't some abstract, idle concern for Joshua Gruber. It was as tangible as the pile of concrete, steel, flesh and ash smoldering at Manhattan's southern end on 9/11, the day he was in the north tower of the World Trade Center.

But flying home to California for Christmas on JetBlue -- his first cross-country trip after the tragedy -- made the whole thing easier to take. The staff seemed like human beings, not corporate automatons. The planes were brand-new. Best of all, as he flew, Gruber could watch the Food Network on his own private television screen.

"You'd sit down, watch Food TV, and, before you'd know it, you'd be there," Gruber said. "It made it easier to fly after Sept. 11 to have that distraction."

Although the airline is known for its cheap fares, he added, "I'd pay more to fly JetBlue. I had, in fact. And I had encouraged my friends to try it."

All of which makes JetBlue's decision to hand its passenger records over to a firm doing a government terrorist-screening study even more maddening to Gruber.

"It made it sort of like I had been betrayed by a friend, rather than by a big company," he said.

But the JetBlue privacy debacle has unleashed unusual passions in the public. Already, there's a class action lawsuit against the carrier for its data handover. Gruber has received more than a thousand e-mails from outraged JetBlue customers. And the Department of Homeland Security is beginning to conduct an internal investigation into how passenger data is used.

Why the fuss? Passengers, privacy advocates and airline analysts all sound a common theme: Fliers like Joshua Gruber developed powerful ties to JetBlue, ties that are unusual between airlines and their customers.

When the company turned over its customers' private records without their knowledge -- in violation of JetBlue's own privacy policy -- that sense of corporate love quickly exploded into rage.

"Out of all the airlines, I wouldn't have expected it from them," said Fran Brivic, a 46-year-old recreation director for a nursing home. "JetBlue presented themselves as a people-oriented airline. This feels like a slap in the face."

JetBlue did more than just present itself as customer-friendly. The company's on-time performance in 2002 was 3 percent better than the major airlines' average, according to The Motley Fool. The typical turnaround time at the gate was 35 minutes -- almost half that of major airlines. And in the first quarter of this year, while more than 10,000 people were bumped off major airline flights because of overbooking, no JetBlue passengers suffered the same fate.

All of this, combined with lower-than-average fares, lead to high growth rates: 65 percent last quarter, in an industry that's been shrinking 10 to 15 percent a year, according to John Ash, with the airline consultancy Global Aviation Associates.

"It's just an outstanding airline, across the board," he said.

Which has made the privacy affair even harder to swallow for customers.

"People expect the big, old legacy carriers to screw up. They didn't expect this from JetBlue," Ash added.